Get a Hobby

This is my life, respect it as I respect yours. I do not judge you for the way in which you choose to live yours nor do hold anything against you for it. We all have our flaws, our skeletons in our closets and I was not placed on this earth to pass judgment on you just as you weren't put here to place judgment on me.

If for some reason you feel that you have too much idle time on your hands and you cannot stop meddling in another's personal life, get a hobby. There are a number of things you can do I am sure that would suit you well, if you cannot think of anything, I will list a few for you to choose from.

1. Needle point - This is one that will occupy both your hands and your mind freeing you from the keyboard and with the intricate stitching and knotting it should keep your mind focused and off other people and their lives.

2. Knitting / Weaving - Another physical and mental hobby to occupy yourself with and keep you from judgmental activity of another.

3. Coin Collecting - This will just occupy you and have you going through your penny banks, pockets and those ashtrays you use to catch all that loose change around the house, sorting and mounting in coin books instead of going through someone else's personal life.

4. Stamp Collecting - This will have you looking forward to the mailman each day and going through old letters and postcards instead of going through someone's privacy.

5. Recipes - Cook up something for yourself and for your family instead of cooking up malicious gossip, your family will appreciate your efforts much more than the dish you are trying to serve up in a chat room.

6. Swizzle Sticks - Collect these. Take all that spare time you seem to have and head for the nearest bar, you can make days out of it. Choose several different bars each day and collect swizzle sticks. Inebriate your brain with alcohol and ruin your life and forget all about your feeble attempts at ruining someone else's.

7. Rock Collecting - This has to be one of the simplest hobbies there are. Rocks are everywhere you look. And if you find that you are running out of places to look, you can always tilt your head to one side and shake it vigorously. I am sure there will be a few gems that will fall from there and at the same time lighten that load of insipid and ignorant misinformation that seems to collect there.

8. Fishing - When you feel the need to sink your hooks into something, try a fish.

9. Bungee Jumping - Exhilarating, but try it with a twist, measure the distance to the ground and add a foot to the length of the bungee cord.

10. Music - Learn to play an instrument and sweeten the sour notes that always seem to issue forth from you.

11. Insect Collecting - This is a very good hobby to learn social skills and how to get along with others. Plus you keep to asphyxiate them and then stick pins through them, thus satisfying that need you get in doing it to others.

12. Swimming - This has always been a great hobby, but get creative with it and tie a cement block to your ankles. You will learn to hold your breath for longer periods and build up those leg muscles, instead of others always holding their breath when you come around.

These are just twelve out of hundreds and hundreds of hobbies you can find to keep your mind and body occupied instead of making other people's lives your hobbies. And if this fails and you cannot find a hobby, you can always get a life and start living your own instead of living vicariously through someone else's.

Later...

Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise

Someone once told me that tomorrow the sun will rise. I thought of those words today as I sat in the funeral home's chapel. I stood and walked up the aisle to the tiny little casket to look on the face of my youngest grandson and I thought to myself how someone so small, so new to the world could affect so many. For a small pebble he created far reaching ripples and had already managed to touch many in his short life.

As I hugged Micky I told him, "Be strong, remember what you were taught. There are others that love you and depend on you. Be strong for them. You are not saying goodbye, you will see him again. I love you son, we are family and I will always be here for you, never forget that."

I listened to the preacher as he spoke his words to try and comfort Micky and his wife Angel and give them some reason for why this happened. As I thought to myself I wondered if there really is an explanation for why a child so young has been taken to their final rest? I have buried so many in my life, but other than my father and Linda, this was by far the hardest on me. Not really for the fact that he was gone from this world, but rather because he would not be here any longer to bless the ones that love him.

Anyone that knows me, knows that the word goodbye is one I do not use. There is too much finality in it and to me to say goodbye means something has ended. As his eulogy said,"As we stand here by Cody's grave today, the wind blows, see this as him embracing you. I never kept to meet him, but I will someday. Goodbye is the hardest thing to say, so I will not say goodbye to Cody Wayne, I am going to say I will see you later."

Cody Wayne Weber
January, 16, 2009 came into this world and left to his final rest on March 31, 2009.

Later...

In Memory of Cody Wayne Weber

An Echo
We are here for a moment and in a blink we are gone, cry not for one lost, for they wait for you to come home...

Today I received a call from my stepson Micky. I was thinking he was calling to wish me a happy birthday, but he had very sad news to tell me. His first born son, Cody Wayne died in his sleep March 31, 2009. He was only 2 months old.

Funeral is April 5, 2009 and I find it hard to face the fact that I never even kept to hold him, see his face or hear his cry. A child or grandchild should never precede a parent or grand parent's death. It is sad to say that I will not have the chance to take him to the park, the zoo or do any of those things a grand parent does with their grandchild.

Later...

Too Many Candles, Not Enough Cake

Today I celebrate another year of life on this planet, if celebrating is what you want to call it. A milestone, life marker and another year behind me. We mark our time on earth by the passing of 365 days and 366 every forth year. Some look forward to it, especially those under the age of consent and others seem to count any new aches and pains that they have accrued since their last birthday. For some, they never can seem to get past 39.

I am reminded on this day not of what it means, but rather something my oldest grandson said once. We had lit the candles on the cake and we were all gathered around the table, right before blowing out the candles he looked at me with the most serious look a child could have and said, "Big fire grandpa." It all sunk home right away and I thought to myself then that would only be getting bigger as the years pass. Before long a fire extinguisher will be a requirement next to the cake and soon I won't have to have icing on the cake, just light the candles and let them burn a while, soon the melted wax will coat it enough. Another thought is just go ahead and pour the raw batter in the cake pan and the heat from the candles will have baked it in no time at all. I guess getting older also means getting greener.

I was wondering how to better accept the fact that I am getting older this morning while lying in bed and it struck me, stop using simple math. 16x4-10=54, the first thing anyone will notice is 16. Plus by subtracting 10 years it helps to make it look as if I have been credited a decade. So maybe it doesn't look so bad after all and makes it a bit more acceptable.

I was thinking with all of the candles on the cake, sunglasses should be given out before lighting them. That would definitely help protect eyes and after all you should never look directly into the sun. I would hate to think that I was the cause for burning someone's retinas. I should also call and see if I will need a permit for burning so many candles, I would not want to violate and city ordinances. Seems the older I get the more safety issues come into play.

Think I will just break out the martini shaker, close the curtains and just skip this year...too much adieu about nothing.

Later...

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

My father was one to worry and he could worry about anything it always seemed to me. Seems most of his worries were caused by myself and siblings though. One thing he would always tell us though is that we should never sweat the small stuff and in the big picture of life, it is all small. I always felt this was an oxymoron of sorts, why would he give us that piece of advice when that was all we saw him doing? Mortgage, utilities, loans, medical, food and the inevitable clothing of five kids. Sometimes I would think that he actually enjoyed worrying, that he could not be happy unless he was worrying about something. No matter how inane or minuscule it may be, he always seemed to find something to worry about.

I think I mistook his worrying as being overly protective or too controlling, but I think that had to do more with the times I grew up in rather than it was him being a parent. One thing I can say is that he always respected our privacy as long as it did not cause us any harm or upset the status quo of the home. Or any police officers knocking on the door with one of us in tow. We weren't angels growing up, far from it, but then we weren't all that bad either, albeit we did have our moments, but we never sweated it, after all it was small and that was his basic philosophy to us, so we felt that why worry when we had him to do it for us. Maybe we abused that privilege at times to the point he would be sitting on the front porch at 2am when we would finally come home. Without saying a word he would get up, walk in the house and go to bed never asking us where we had been. Not to say that we got away with it, inevitably there was some sort of price to pay and that started at 5am with a very boisterous wake up call. It never bothered me to be woke up at that time seeing how my normal time to get up was 5:30am anyway. As we would make our way down stairs and to breakfast it seemed my father was rewarding us with pancakes, eggs, bacon, toast and hash brown potatoes, that is until breakfast was over and during breakfast he would sit and jot down tings on paper and make small talk. Never asking why we were out so late and not expecting any excuses. When breakfast was over he would stand, grab his lunch and jacket and say, "I cooked it, you can clean it." and then head out the door leaving the piece of paper he had been writing on held down by his plate. Clearing the table and walking into the kitchen we would see that he had used every frying pan, bowl and utensil at his disposal fixing our grand breakfast for us with all the spills, splashes and scorched bottoms to frying pans that he could make. Keep in mind that we had what was called Revere Ware, copper and stainless steel and he expected it to shine without being scratched from the steel wool scouring pad, so this entailed that we pour water in the pans and boil them until all the remnants were released and then "lovingly" wash them. Everything had to shine or when he got home he would pull everything out of the cabinets and make us do them all over again, didn't have to tell us, the noise from the kitchen told us we were going to be doing it again, so we did it right the first time.

We had the cleanest windows and window sills in town I think, that was usually item number 2 on our list of things to do and not with Windex, but rather with vinegar and water and newspaper. There better not be one dead bug in the windows either or cob web in one of the upper corners. Do you know how hard it is to get Vaseline off glass? I do and it is not an easy thing to do.

We had hardwood floors, so I guess you can imagine what item number three was. Sweep, mop and then wax them and only with paste wax, nothing liquid that did not require buffing. Moving all the furniture sucked, but the buffing of the floor was easy. Grab the old olive drab wool Army blanket, park my younger brother on it and drag him around the house until the floors shined.

Next were the bath rooms and these too best be spotless. Everything under the lavatory had to come out, all porcelain had to be cleaned and shined, all grout had to be bleached and whitened and then the tiles washed and cleaned. My father never let us throw away a used tooth brush, they had a second life in the bath room and that was to clean it and clean it thoroughly.

The next items led us outside, I guess he felt we needed the sun and the exercise. Lawn was always nice and when he mowed, it was always with the gas powered mower, when we mowed it was a push type rotary mower. Edging along the drive and sidewalks with hand clippers and the bushes trimmed and squared with those unwieldy over sized scissors that made your shoulders, arms and neck ache for several days afterwards. Then we had to dispose of the grass clippings and leaves properly. That meant bagging them in brown paper grocery bags, folding the top neatly and taping them closed and marked so that the gardener that my dad got vegetables from could come by and pick them up and add to his compost pile. Then the drive itself needed to be scrubbed with washing detergent and bleach until all stains were gone or barely noticeable. Yes my father took pride in his house and it showed through the efforts of our not sweating the small stuff.

The garage was usually last on his agenda. I do not care how clean and organized it looked, he would always decide that it would look better if things were rearranged and cleaned completely out and if in the process we spilled anything on the drive way, we would end up washing it again. My father liked light and lots of it. He said it always made a place look cleaner, less dingy, so our garage on one side had a row of windows front to back, these too had to be cleaned and treated just as equally as the house windows. There was no ceiling in our garage, just open rafters and beams, these had to have any bird's nests removed and then disinfected to kill any mites or other parasite that it might have carried and and let's not forget those industrious spiders and their magnificent lace work. I wold ask my dad why he never used pesticides or insecticides, he would answer that most bugs were due to things not being as clean as they should be and why should he invest in things like that when he had four sons and a daughter. He thought we were the best exterminators money could buy.

When he would arrive home we would be waiting with a glass of ice tea for him, fresh, nothing made yesterday, the mail and his newspaper. He would always ask the same thing, "Why do all of you look so tired? You act as if you had to work today." Then his "inspection" would start, if we followed him around he would look a bit more thoroughly than just leaving him alone and let him get it over with. Of course we never did anything 100%, there was always some little something, an over sight we would miss and he would single out just one of us to come to take care of what he had found. One thing about him, he was not partial, we all shared the same fate and he did not want to hear any excuses or the pointing of any blame. All five of us were in this together. When one would mess up, we would all pay for it, that was my father's way.

Once done, he would sit in his recliner, read the mail, sip his tea and then start on the reading of his newspaper. The newspaper was always the way we knew if he was satisfied with our efforts, if he popped the pages instead of turning them quietly, we knew we would be doing something over again. We did not disturb him during this time in fear we may plant a seed and give him other ideas or maybe that he had forgotten something he wanted done. Once done he would stand and go to each of us and ask what our plans were for that evening. Seems that we all always had the same answer, "Too tired to do anything tonight."

In a sense maybe he was glad we never sweated the "small stuff", it saved him and mom a lot of work around the house. Sitting at the dinner table on those occasions, he still never mentioned the fact that we were out till 2am roaming the streets, he would continue with his small talk and start his jotting down on paper. I would shudder when he would say, "I passed a house on the way home from work, they had repainted it and it looked very nice." Something in the back of my mind could picture paint brushes and ladders in my future. I would think, "Maybe I need to start sweating the small stuff." Because it was apparent that by not doing so was costing me dearly and ruining my social life. Even though one of us thought about it, being four others in this home maintenance crew it was inevitable that the thought was not unanimous. One of us would be the downfall of the other four and we would just sit and stare around the table at each other.

When I look back on it now, I smile and when I talk to my younger brother about those ruined summer days and weekends working when all of our friends would be at the lake swimming, fishing or just hanging out, we would laugh and then go quiet lost in those days when not sweating the small stuff added up to a lesson in why we should worry. Actions do have consequences and one's actions affect more than themselves. Do I regret any of it? Not in the least, it taught me things that have stayed with me through out my 54 years in life. My father always said the best lesson in life to be learned was the one you learned the hard way, it was more apt to stick with you and not forgotten. Examples and impressions were two of my father's more formidable teaching tools and he could use them quite well and very effectively. He had a way of driving a point home without ever raising his voice or his hand and always gave you time to think about it.

On May 17, 1973 I was informed my father was dead. In the late 1960's he was diagnosed with degenerative despondilisys, bone cancer of the neck and lower back. He woke that morning to find that he was paralyzed from the mid chest down. He reached over to his night stand, washed down a handful of pain pills, muscle relaxers and sleeping pills with a half bottle of Vat 69 scotch and then ended his worries with a .25 caliber bullet. The last conversation I remember having with him was about two weeks before I went into the Air Force, "Ron, remember that we are never without responsibility in life, that no matter what you do there will always be some one you are responsible to and things you will be responsible for. Never think you are any better than the one that stands next to you or think you are any less than them. Know where you came from, how you got to where you are and those that helped you along the way. Be proud of your accomplishments, but never prideful. Remember that nothing is ever free, that you earn everything. Never be afraid to try something you have never done before and never think there is anything you can't do. Never take advantage of another's weakness or use that weakness against them. Enemies are easier to make than friends, so think about what you do or say before it is history. Never be ashamed to fail, just remember you tried, a lot of people never do that much. Do not be afraid to speak your mind or what you may think is best, a collective thought is always easier to accomplish than a single thought of one person. Respect another's life, idea and the way they choose to live their life. Advice is only good to the one giving it, what may work for you may not work for the one you are giving it to. Be careful when you talk about yourself and family. Remember your family and remember what family is. There is no one else outside of you and family you can depend on. Hold on to your values and beliefs and what you were taught. Remember you only have to speak the truth once." This is not verbatim of that evening, but it is what he wanted to tell me. I think he had already at that time in his life realized that his days of worrying were coming to an end and soon he would not be with us any longer. Do I miss him? Yeah, I do, but one thought I can take comfort in is in the fact that he is no longer suffering or worrying. He is not sweating the small stuff any longer.

Later...

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Being born male I am afflicted with a genetic deficiency known as "Foot in the Mouth Disease" and once again it seems it has manifested itself. The most prevalent symptom to this disease is "assuming or assumption" and knowing this one would think I would know when this malady is about to afflict me and I could curtail the oncoming idiocy. The male ego and machismo seems to mask the symptom and disguise it with the "they will understand" endorphin and I continue on with the inevitable stupid thinking that will eventually lead to suffering an onslaught of this deficiency.

The history of this gender specific genetic disability is as old as man himself and goes back to when he assumed that his role in life was to be the king of his castle or the cock of the walk, whichever he chose to display himself. It has caused the ruin of many relationships in the past and the demise of many good friendships. Through out history when it has been given an illustration it has always been with a male image, whether painted, chiseled in stone, drawn in pen and pencil or written about. It is proof without doubt that through the ages man, (the male and not figuratively speaking) is his own worst enemy and if today is any evidence that these things that have been witnessed to time and time again in the past through the present, I do not see any chance of the gene becoming dormant or evolutionarily changed. Man will always be man and he is hell bent on wearing that same worn out coat he has inherited and will most likely pass it down to his progeny.

As my previous post attests to and demonstrates very well, I have proved that the gene is alive and well, thriving unchanged.

I guess what this is, is my feeble attempt at an apology for thinking I could post what I did without thought of any consequences. Again my thoughts have cost me something very dear to me and I will bear this scar with shame for what I have done when all I would have had to do was think and then not post it.(hindsight being 20/20) It is said that it is best to be thought a fool than to open mouth and erase all doubt. I guess that is why in school it was always the boys that dusted the erasers, maybe the teacher's subliminal lesson that as we grow we should realize that there are consequences to our actions and that we will forever be trying to erase some mistake we have made.

This is not an excuse for my stupidity, just a realization that consideration for another should come first.

これは私の愚かさに対する弁解、ただもう１（つ・人）に対する考慮が最初に来るべきであるという認識ではありません。 より遅れている

Sumimasen

Later...

Post Script: I guess I will stick to fiction in the future.

Out of Left Field

There is a saying I grew up with when someone throws something at you that you weren't quite expecting. "Out of left field." There is one I talk to on here who is quite gifted when throwing something at me out of left field. I came across a video I thought was quite humorous, albeit a little graphic, but the jist of the video was like an old "Candid Camera" clip and I thought they would see the humor in it too, so I sent the link. To my chagrin they asked, "Do you like porn?" and like any noble gentleman I answered as honestly as my modesty would let me, "When I as younger I liked it very much." I continued saying that after a while it all gets to being about the same and I did not delve into it that much now. Then another fast one came out of left field, "I Like it." It took the better part of five minutes to get my lower jaw reacquainted with my upper teeth. Not that they haven't in the past thrown a few "zingers" in my direction and usually with the same dumbfounded reactions from me. If fingers could stutter, mine would have been.

I guess one thing I appreciate the most about this person and what endears them to me is the openness in which we can talk. No topic barred and there are no retributions for what has been said. Even those times we part and I feel a bit chaise for being called out on something. I keep forgetting that this person reads me like a book for the most part and there are times they know what I am going to say before I say it to them. But we can talk and not feel any guilt for anything that is said. One of the few I have met that when talking about sex does not lead to sex. Politics do not lead to arguments. Lifestyles does not lead to prejudiced thoughts. I do not think I have met anyone like them and I have a feeling people like them are few and far between. So it is that when one is fortunate enough to meet one such as them, you do not want to lose them from your life. That is how I feel.

I have been "accused" by some of being in love with this person. Yes, in a sense I am, but not in the sense you might think. It is something one would feel between the love they would feel for a daughter and the love they would feel for a woman. There have been some that are jealous of this and it has caused friendships to crumble and fall apart. They say I put this person before too many things and maybe I do, but they do not understand why I do and I do not bother to explain it to them. I have been told I had a choice to make, to pick them or this one I am writing about. I am still talking to the one I am writing about and if given the option to choose again in the future, I would still want to keep what we have with this person.

I have never explained why and maybe I do not really know why I feel the way I do about them, I have never questioned it, I just accept it and I am very happy they are in my life. I can say one thing, when all others have turned away, walked away and left me standing in the cold, this one has always been there with a warm word. They do not judge me nor do they question me, they do however impart a bit of themselves. For one to be so young in their life, within them they hold the wisdom of many years.

So again, even though I have said it many times before, I want to thank this person for always being there when needed, for lifting me up, putting a smile on my face and giving me the chance to knock the dust from my life and keep seeing tomorrow. I will forever in my life be indebted to them for what of themselves they have given me.

My wonderful and beautiful friend, this one is for you, knock it out of left field.

Later...